Friday, May 2, 2014

Sharing Subfolder in Dropbox

This is taken mostly from Sharing subfolders of shared folder – dropbox by Sebastian Suchanowski.

I need to share my business card scanning subfolder to my assistant (who is to properly type them out and create a contact (VCF) file for me to import to my Outlook and sync-ed to my Gmail, Blackberry and Android(s). (a subject of another post). But for some reason or another, I want to share a subfolder of my scanning directory, not all.

Dropbox (unlike Box.com) still cannot handle this as as of May 2014, so the workaround is to create a new folder in the root of your dropbox account, and create a symbolic (junction) link that act as a subfolder from wherever you want it to be in your directory tree. With a symbolic link, Windows explorer will act as if the link is a sub-folder, but dropbox only see a small ".lnk" file. Dropbox actually synchronize/share the new folder.

For this post, I assume you have used dropbox Sync to sync your dropbox account to your local drive at:
  C:/Users/Me/dropbox

and you want this subfolder to be shared to another person
  C:/Users/Me/dropbox/MyCurrentFolder/WantToShareSubfolder

I also assume you know how to invoke "cmd.exe" and get the window command.exe dos shell.

STEP 1 - CREATE THE SHARED FOLDER IN DROPBOX

a. Create a folder in the root directory of your dropbox account.
   mkdir C:/Users/Me/dropbox/NewShare

b. Share it with whoever you want.

STEP 2 - CREATE THE LINK IN YOUR DIRECTORY STRUCTURE

a. Create the symbolic (junction) link using the "mklink" command.
  cd C:/Users/Me/dropbox/MyCurrentFolder/
   mklink /J WantToShareSubfolder C:/Users/Me/dropbox/NewShare

That's it.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks, this worked locally for me. However, when opening the new shared subfolder within DropBox (web version), the folder showed empty. Same with others with whom I shared the folder.
Could it be because I didn't have the linked folder at the root level? I had the canonical links created inside another root level folder which wasn't shared and then shared its subfolders (which were canonical links created as you showed here) .
On my local computer it was fine the links were fine, but the sync showed empty folders even using my DropBox user on a different computer.